The Future Of :Hulu. The End of Free Streaming

Back when Hulu began, it was service mostly for catch up of network shows with some extra stuff added in , mostly because it’s owned by major networks. It was all for free (thanks to commercials), Hulu then added a new pay service in 2011, called Hulu Plus , as away to have more content and exclusives and to get itself able to be on mobile devices. In 2015, they announced a new commercial free option , which was do with one of the complaints about the Netflix competitor. In the same year also dropped the name Hulu Plus , but the free service still exists.

They have plans for 2017 to add a new live stream service that will be away to attract those pay TV leavers. (source: USA Today) Monday , Hulu announced that they will soon be ending the free service that started it all.

“For the past couple years, we’ve been focused on building a subscription service that provides the deepest, most personalized content experience possible to our viewers,” says Ben Smith, Hulu senior vp and head of experience. “As we have continued to enhance that offering with new originals, exclusive acquisitions and movies, the free service became very limited and no longer aligned with the Hulu experience or content strategy.”

There is more to the story : The Free version isn’t being put into the wood chipper , it’s being moved to Yahoo on a site called Yahoo View . Hulu has made a deal with Yahoo to allow the free content to be on the new site. It will allow people to watch 5 episodes of a show from ABC,NBC,and Fox (their parent companies are owners of Hulu) eight days after broadcast (Hulu will have them earlier on the pay service) and also most of the content Hulu Free had.

Interestingly enough, accroding to Jess Lee, Vice President of Yahoo’s Lifestyles Product , the site will also be connected to Yahoo owned Tumblr, as he said on the company’s Tumblr site:

You can also go beyond the episode with behind-the-scenes extras, recaps, and the best GIFs, photos and edits from the Tumblr fandom community.

Yahoo View is open and ready to use now , they will be making some apps in the future , meanwhile Hulu’s free product will be winding down very soon. their pay service is $7.99 a month or $11.99 for the the commercial free service.